Chapter 8
“Eleven. Twelve.” Scott Sinclair clenched his jaw and lifted the eight-pound weight in his right hand three more times. That was five more reps than the physical therapist said. He set down the weight and reached for a towel, the muscle in his arm quivering.
Scott wiped his face, then rested on the workout bench at the rehab center he came to every Wednesday and Friday.
Today was his tenth Wednesday appointment and six months after getting shot.
Rehabbing his shoulder was taking way too long—at this rate he’d never get his old job back.
At least he’d lived. Andy hadn’t, and Scott still couldn’t sleep at night because of it.
“Sinclair, tell me I did not see an eight-pound weight in your hand.”
Busted. The statement came from his physical therapist. Scott swung around on the bench, ignoring the way his right arm trembled when he used the towel again to wipe sweat from his face.
“It’s only three pounds more than I was using last week.” He grinned at Joe Green, who was the toughest PT at the center. “I thought you’d be proud of me.”
“You know you’re not to lift more than five pounds.
Your arm isn’t ready for that much weight, even if it’s only three additional pounds.
” Joe shook his head. “I don’t know which is worse, a patient who won’t do anything or one who ignores the rules and overdoes it.
You’ll be lucky if you didn’t tear something. ”
Scott flexed his right hand, mentally willing his fingers to make a fist, but there was little response to the command, thanks to the bullet that had plowed into his shoulder and damaged the nerves and tendons running to his hand. “What are the odds of getting the use of this hand back?”
Joe stared at him a minute and rubbed his jaw. “Probably fifty-fifty—if you don’t overwork the muscles and nerves.”
“You really believe that?”
Joe didn’t respond right away.
“Tell me the truth.”
“I don’t know what the truth is. If it was just determination on your part, I’d say you’d be back on the shooting range within three months with your right hand.
But the bullet wasn’t the only reason for the damage to your arm—cutting it out of your shoulder took a toll on the muscles—it’s going to take a lot longer—possibly even a year. ”
Not what he wanted to hear. Scott flexed his left hand.
“How’s your aim with that hand?” Joe asked.
“Not good enough to qualify on the shooting range and get my job back.” Returning to the FBI as an undercover agent was his top priority.
“If you practice as hard at using your left hand as you do at rehabbing your right, you’ll get there a whole lot quicker.”
“I don’t know. It takes more thinking to use my left hand.”
“That’ll get better with practice.” Joe cocked his head. “Do you fly fish?”
“Fly fish?”
“Yeah. It’d be a great exercise for your left hand to learn accuracy and dexterity.”
“So, you don’t think I’ll regain the use of my right hand.”
“I didn’t say that. But it’s always good to have options. I’ve had patients who actually had better accuracy when they switched to their left hand . . . and some who didn’t. But they were the ones who didn’t—”
“Practice,” Scott finished for him, and they both laughed.
“Have you ever tried it, fly fishing?”
“Yeah, when I was a kid.” For years, his brother, Nick, had set aside the second Saturday of the month to spend time with Scott.
When he was old enough, that Saturday was spent fly fishing, and once he got the hang of it, Scott had enjoyed it. And with Logan Lake so close, Nick might even have a fly rod at the house that he and Taylor had remodeled.
Joe held up a tennis ball. “I’m adding a new hand-eye coordination exercise to your home program.”
He led Scott to a wall and demonstrated the exercise before handing the ball to Scott. “Bounce the ball against the wall—five times to start with overhand, then underhand, and then switch hands and repeat. After that, repeat the process but with one eye closed. Start with your left hand.”
Scott had been a Little League pitcher, but that’d been with his right hand. Still, how difficult could it be? He missed the ball the first catch. “This is harder than it looks.”
“Right.”
Determined to do it, Scott concentrated and managed to not drop the ball until the fifth throw. He could see how this would increase his dexterity.
When he completed the exercise, Joe said, “That’s a wrap for today. Keep doing the home exercises, and I’ll see you Friday at ten.”
After rehab, Scott stopped by Two Cups, the local coffee shop, for his reward—a venti caramel latte—before he drove to his brother’s house.
The sweet drink was his one concession to avoiding a routine, especially since it gave him a boost after the pain he’d endured.
At least the physical therapy practice was in Logan Point and he didn’t have to drive the twenty minutes into Memphis for therapy.
For a small town, Logan Point had a good medical center.
He opted to drive through the quaint town with the two-hundred-year-old courthouse in the center of the town square and storefronts still in use.
Stores like the hardware shop on the corner where you could find just about anything you wanted.
Or the drugstore across the street that, according to the sign over the door, had been there almost as long as the courthouse.
Soon he was on the road out of town and turning onto Coley Road, which would take him to Oak Grove, the house that had been in his sister-in-law’s family for over a hundred years. Taylor and Nick had done a great job with the remodel.
He passed by the sign advertising Kate Adams’s pottery shop and almost turned in.
It’d been at least a week since he’d seen her.
If it hadn’t been for Kate, Scott might still be wandering around seeking answers to questions that only God knew.
He smiled. Kate never pulled any punches.
She called a spade a spade whether you liked it or not.
But he needed to find a fishing rod, and Nick was leaving soon. He drove on to his brother’s house a quarter mile up the road. When he turned into the drive and parked, Nick left the wheelbarrow he’d been pushing and walked to the car.
No one would ever mistake them for brothers, and it wasn’t just the ink on Scott’s arms. Nick looked just like his dad—black hair and olive complexion on a runner’s frame whereas Scott had his mother’s brown hair and his birth dad’s muscular build.
A dad he barely remembered, but Nick’s dad had taken him in and raised him as his own, even giving him the Sinclair name.
Their deaths in a plane crash and then a generous allowance from a trust fund from his grandfather on his mother’s side had sent him in a direction he never hoped to go again.
Scott rubbed his jaw. As a recovering alcoholic, he knew that even with a ten-year sobriety pin, he was only one drink from throwing it all away.
He climbed out of his pickup and waited for Nick to reach him before nodding at the wheelbarrow. “I thought you had a deadline.”
Like his previous books, his brother’s last release was a New York Times bestseller, and the one he was working on would be as well.
“Finished it, and now I have a wife who wants a row of miniature marigolds across the front of the house before we leave for the book tour in the morning.”
Taylor loved her flowers. Scott glanced around—his sister-in-law was usually the one with her hands in the dirt. “I’m surprised she’s not helping.”
“Ben called a little earlier and asked her to do a profile on a victim.”
Taylor freelanced as a victim profiler when she wasn’t helping at the Walls of Jericho teen camp she and his brother started years ago. Scott questioned Nick with his eyes.
“Jenny Tremont’s murder Saturday morning,” Nick said.
Scott still couldn’t wrap his mind around Jenny’s death. She was the last person he expected to be murdered. Scott rolled his shoulders, and pain stabbed his arm, making him wince.
“How’d your session go?” Nick asked.
“Okay.”
Nick studied him. “You don’t sound like it went okay.”
“Joe doesn’t think I’ll regain the use of my right hand.”
“Did he actually say that?”
“Not in so many words.”
His brother lifted an eyebrow. “In other words, no.”
Scott stared at the ground. “Then why is he pushing me to learn how to do things with my left hand?”
“Would being proficient with both hands be a bad thing?”
Ever the encourager. “You sound like Joe, and you’re right, as always. Hey, do you still have those fly rods?”
Nick blinked. “What?”
“The fly rods we used back in the day.”
“I guess—they should be around here somewhere. Why?”
“Joe said fly fishing would help with hand-eye coordination.”
“Good idea.” Nick thought a minute. “They’re in the basement. Walk with me to the house, and we’ll see which one you want.”
The basement could only be accessed through the house, and they climbed the steps and entered through a large hallway that ran the length of the structure.
It still surprised him that Taylor even wanted to fix up the house after the terrible memories she had here.
“You two did a great job of restoring this place.”
“Thanks. It has good bones.”
It was also on the National Register of Historic Places due to its age and the tunnels that led from the basement to the nearby lake and river that enslaved people had used to escape to the North.
In the basement, Nick flipped on a light switch, revealing a computer in the center of the room, a whiteboard like detectives used, and a corkboard with photos. Nick’s man cave where he churned out his mysteries.
Scott knew better than to bother Nick when he was writing and could count on one hand the times he’d been down here in the basement. “You have a good setup here.”
Nick chuckled. “You think? It’s my favorite place to write—plenty of solitude and room.”
Scott glanced at the door across the room. More than a century ago, the house had been a stop on the Underground Railroad, and the door opened to the network of tunnels.
Nick nodded toward the far wall. “The rods are over here.”
Scott followed him to where several rods and reels were mounted. Nick lifted one off the rack and handed it to him.
“This is the one you always used.”
Scott held the rod and flicked it back and forth, memories of their times together bombarding him. “In case I haven’t said this enough, thanks for being a brother when you didn’t have to be. Couldn’t have been easy having a little kid follow you around all the time.”
“It wasn’t so terrible, since you weren’t a bad kid.”
“Maybe not then . . .”
Neither of them spoke for a minute, the bad times filling the space. But that was then. He liked to think he’d redeemed himself as an FBI undercover agent.
He nodded at the rod in his hand. “This one will be fine.”
“Take this one as well. That way if the line gets too tangled, you’ll have a backup.”
He took the second rod and reel. His brother knew him too well. “Thanks. Hopefully this will help me to qualify on the shooting range with my left hand. Then I’ll get my old job back.”
Nick opened his mouth as if to say something, then closed it. He rubbed the back of his neck, and then he pinned Scott with his gaze. Scott steeled himself for what he knew was coming.
“I know I shouldn’t say anything,” his brother said. “But would not going back into undercover work be so bad? It almost killed you the last time.”
At least he didn’t mention Andy, but it was the same song and verse Scott had heard from the time he’d woken up after surgery. His brother just didn’t get it. Do not lose it. “It’s who I am, Nick,” Scott said evenly.
“It is not who you are.”
That’s where he was wrong. If Scott wasn’t an FBI undercover agent, then who was he?